Book Review & Giveaway: White Out

Synopsis:

Kylie Milliard is the only detective on the police force in the little town of Hagen, North Dakota. She dreams of landing a job as a detective with the larger Fargo, North Dakota police force.

White Out opens with a harrowing motor vehicle crash on an icy road outside Hagen. Lily Baker survives the accident, but when she regains consciousness she has no idea who she is or why she was a passenger in a car on that highway. She recalls scattered Bible verses and an image of a man lying in a pool of blood.

On the same night, a young woman is murdered and her body tossed in a dumpster behind a bar in Hagen. Kylie doesn’t immediately recognize the victim, but soon discovers that the dead woman and Lily share a dark past. Lily and Kylie both want answers.

As not only the sole detective on the force, but a woman working with a mostly male group of police officers, Kylie has to play by the book.

And Lily needs to stay safe. But the more Lily learns about her identity, the more she fears the truth.

Review:

White Out is the first installment in author Danielle Girard’s new Badlands Thriller series. Far Gone, the second volume, is scheduled to be released in 2021.

The new series marks a departure for Girard, who penned the Dr. Annabelle Schwartzman and Rookie Club series, both of which were set in her native California Bay Area. Instead of examining issues related to the San Francisco Police Department, White Out is set in the tiny fictional town of Hagen, North Dakota, population 864. Kylie Milliard is new to the police force, but dreams of a job as a detective with the Fargo police department, the nearest thing to a big city.

Kylie may be the only female detective in Hagen, but she is a savvy one. She is keenly aware of her status and the way that her actions are being apprised not only by her fellow officers, but by the citizens of the small community. She cracks her knuckles to alleviate stress, relishing the “satisfying release” of popping the knuckles on both hands one at a time. She feels her frustration, especially with the Hagen police department boys’ club, “eke out with the tightness in her joints” as she contemplates her next investigative move. Glen Vogel, the District Attorney, persists in referring to her as a “good girl,” but Kylie knows that if she wants to succeed, she has to overlook the misogyny she encounters from her fellow officers while demonstrating her prowess. She is determined to find the killer of a young woman whose body was tossed in a dumpster behind the local bar owned and operated by Hagen native, Iver Larson, who inherited the establishment from his father. Hagen is a town where all the citizens know each other. Even though there has been an influx of oil workers, Hagen is still a place where “unfamiliar faces were rare. There was no main highway within twenty miles of Hagen. People who drove the 1804 were either coming to Hagen or leaving it. They didn’t just happen through.” The local sheriff, Jack Davis, graduated from high school three years ahead of Iver. Davis was the local football star, but Iver stayed on the bench. Now Iver lives with the brain injury he sustained while serving in Afghanistan. He survived the IED hitting his Humvee, but mixing his medications with alcohol took a toll on his marriage to his wife, Debbie. “‘Someting bad is going to happen, Iver,’ Debbie had told him the day she’d moved out. ‘I can’t be here when it happens.’ His ex-wife’s parting words.” Now he lives alone with his Australian shepherd-collie mix, Cal. And he’s shaping up to be the prime suspect in a murder investigation because a young woman’s body was found in the dumpster behind his bar. He can’t remember much from the prior evening, except that there was Jack Daniels involved and he went home without retrieving his pills from his office in the bar.

There’s nothing I like more than to put together a case against a man who’s violent with women.” ~~ Detective Kylie Milliard

After the accident, Lily catches a ride into Hagen with a man who not only recognizes her, but seems to know her family history. He takes her to the hospital, where she claims she needs to visit a friend so that she can check on the driver of the vehicle in which she was a passenger. There, she finds that the staff also know her and she seems to be in a relationship with Tim, a hospital employee. She has no memory of any of it.

Girard starts White Out off with Lily regaining consciousness and finding herself trapped in a vehicle that is perched on the edge of a roadway beyond the guardrail through which it crashed, poised to fall thirty or more feet to the ground below. She has no memory of the driver’s identity or how she came to be traveling with him, but is determined to escape the car before it tumbles forward and down the ravine. The tense scene propels Girard’s story into gear, and it continues moving at an unrelenting pace until its equally adrenaline-inducing and shocking conclusion.

Kylie is a compelling lead character, about whose past Girard reveals some details. She is surrounded by an eclectic and equally intriguing cast of supporting players, including Iver, the war veteran who struggles to remember what happened on the night of the murder and keep his demons at bay. No one knows the truth about what really happened that day in Afghanistan, and he wants to keep it that way. He never even told his wife the details of how he came to be the only one to survive the attack. “The people who’d known about that day had all been killed in the Humvee accident.” Sure, Debbie knew that he’s shot people. After all, he was a soldier serving in combat. But Iver “[n]ever let her know just what kind of a man she’d married.” It quickly becomes clear that Lily is also a native of Hagen — she and Iver became good friends after meeting in the Lutheran church’s middle school youth group. Like so many towns in the Dakotas, “Hagen had a strong Lutheran foundation.” Iver also harbors guilt about what happened to Lily when they were fourteen years old. Somehow that event links her to the dead woman in the dumpster. Iver and Lily both had something stolen from them that they can never get back.

It falls to Kylie to figure out how all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together, and she must find answers while protecting herself from nearby enemies. Girard has constructed a mystery that is replete with surprising plot twists, revelations, red herrings, and jaw-dropping developments. She weaves all of the loose ends of the tale into a cohesive thriller in which the setting is an important character. Remote, familiar only to its residents, and populated by characters who share lengthy histories and sometimes fractious relationships, White Out succeeds, in part, because of its setting. As the story progresses, Girard demonstrates that Kylie cannot trust anyone except herself and must rely on her own training instincts in order to find the identity of the killer. White Out is a riveting mystery filled with long-buried small town secrets, surprising motivations, and empathetic characters, each of whom is memorable in his or her own right.

Girard says her goal in crafting White Out was for readers to be unable to stop turning pages. “I hope it keeps people up all night.” She has met and surpassed her goal. White Out is an ambitious and promising start to her new series featuring Detective Kylie Milliard. Readers will be anxiously waiting to find out more about Kylie and learn if her wish to return to Fargo comes true in the next installment.

Enter to Win a Copy of White Out

NOTE: The book may only be mailed to a United States address.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received one electronic copy of White Out free of charge from the author via Net Galley. I was not required to write a positive review in exchange for receipt of the book; rather, the opinions expressed in this review are my own. This disclosure complies with 16 Code of Federal Regulations, Part 255, Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.